Gradient amplifiers in an MRI are solid state and extremely complex components. Due to these characteristics they experience random failure behavior. In other words, it is impossible to predict the failure of a component based on wear-out information. The main disadvantage is that due to the random failure behavior the failures always come as a surprise and will cause significant downtime due to travel time of the service engineer, diagnostics, ordering of parts and the actual replacement of the part.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,373,417 discloses a cable monitoring device and method to detect the failure in at least one gradient coil of a magnetic resonance imaging system. U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0215125 concerns an MRI apparatus which stores automatically measured maintenance and performance data. By analyzing trend data, degradation of the MRI apparatus is recognized. In the known MRI apparatus temperature data of each part are measured.